It looks like the collision which creates Ultimate Thule was a very slow one. 5.5 MPH, to be exact. https://www.express.co.uk/news/scie...ounds-scientists-nasa-new-horizons-space-news
NASA's working on figuring out what New Horizon's next target will be. Here's the bit that jumped out at me So, the target they'll be aiming for is one that's never been seen by an Earth-based telescope (or one in Earth's orbit).
Lawrence Krauss recently released a new podcast where he spoke to Alan Stern, who was in charge of the New Horizons mission. He makes the case for Pluto (as well as many other bodies) being considered planets very convincingly. Worth a listen.
The point they zinged Pluto on as not being a planet because it hadn't "cleared its orbital neighborhood " of other bodies is utterly ridiculous though. Other actual planets such as Venus and Mars come closer to Earth than other bodies in Pluto's orbital neighborhood come to it. By that standard Earth, Venus and Mars are not planets either. Stern, currently leading NASA's New Horizons mission, disagrees with the reclassification of Pluto on the basis of its inability to clear a neighbourhood. One of his arguments is that the IAU's wording is vague, and that—like Pluto—Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Neptune have not cleared their orbital neighbourhoods either. Earth co-orbits with 10,000 near-Earth asteroids (NEAs), and Jupiter has 100,000 trojans in its orbital path. "If Neptune had cleared its zone, Pluto wouldn't be there", he has said.[6] However, Stern himself co-developed one of the measurable discriminants: Stern and Levison's Λ. In that context he stated, "we define an überplanet as a planetary body in orbit about a star that is dynamically important enough to have cleared its neighboring planetesimals ..." and a few paragraphs later, "From a dynamical standpoint, our solar system clearly contains 8 überplanets"—including Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Neptune.[3] Although he proposed this to define dynamical subcategories of planets, he still rejects it for defining what a planet essentially is, advocating the use of intrinsic attributes[7] over dynamical relationships.
Pretty cool. We should put a big interferometry telescope out around Uranus or Neptune, preferably the latter. Neptune is 30 AU from the sun; the parallax of a permanent array there would allow us to map star positions and distances MUCH more accurately than we can now. Not only that, an interferometry telescope would allow us to look at spectragraph lines from neighboring exoplanets, revealing the existence of stuff like chlorophyll, meaning 'green, leafy things.'
In Heinlein's Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, Kip is knocked down on the surface of Pluto when a volcano erupts. I don't know about squid headed aliens, but it looks like Pluto might have active volcanoes.